foreword
Today, with the rapid development of high-tech, enterprises continue to develop new applications to improve efficiency, but some old applications will continue to serve according to business needs. According to a Gartner report, by 2025, 90% of stock applications will continue to be used, and most of them will not receive enough investment in application modernization; by 2025, technical debt will continue to increase on the existing basis and consume More than 40% of the annual IT budget. From this, it is not difficult to see that enterprises face many challenges in digital transformation.
Challenges faced by enterprises in digital transformation
Challenge 1: The complexity and diversity of the business of medium and large enterprises requires the enterprise IT architecture to have "multi-cloud" collaboration capabilities
• The key business and data of an enterprise are usually deployed within the enterprise to ensure the security and compliance of core information.
• In order to meet the requirements of rapid business expansion, flexible utilization of resources, and application of new technology innovations, enterprises will choose to actively embrace the public cloud.
• A simple and effective way is needed to enable the interoperability between the core assets of the enterprise's internal Legacy business and the innovative applications of the public cloud CloudNative.
Challenge 2: The application and business construction of multi-scenario inside and outside the enterprise brings about information islands that are difficult to cross
• Enterprises build too many single-purpose applications to meet the needs of rapidly evolving businesses. The isolated islands of information between applications are serious, and data flow is difficult. Capabilities between applications are difficult to reuse, resulting in a serious waste of resources.
• In order to meet the needs of data interoperability, enterprises have to adopt point-to-point integration. The interface coupling is high, the integration ability and experience cannot be reused, and it is easy to repeat development, resulting in waste of resources and complicated operation and maintenance.
• With the deepening of economic globalization, the division of labor between enterprises and partners has become increasingly clear, and fragmented business systems have prevented enterprises from cooperating with partners in cross-domain collaborative innovation.
Challenge 3: OT data in the production environment cannot efficiently enter the IT system or big data platform
• Multiple industrial equipment and data protocols, closed interface: Most of them are industrial standards from the 1970s to 1980s, and the interface is not open.
• "Manual" and experience management of process parameters: Process experts cannot analyze and optimize manufacturing processes "manually" to break through data silos. There is a digital "gap" between the physical world and the digital world that is difficult to cross.
• As enterprises move towards digitalization and intelligent manufacturing, they must establish the ability to connect all data and use IT (digital capabilities) to transform OT (physical world).
Challenge 4: Enterprises need a new type of IT architecture that is compatible with Legacy and CloudNative applications. Compatibility with the past, interpretation of the future
• Enterprise applications have a long launch cycle, making it difficult to quickly respond to business needs. Traditional enterprise applications focus on stability and process, and it is difficult to meet the expectations of the CEO's "Next Week" online business.
• The cloud-native application based on CloudNative can only solve the problem of enterprise innovation business, and it is difficult to replace the status of the original Legacy enterprise core application in the daily operation of the enterprise.
• A new type of enterprise IT architecture is needed to connect enterprise core applications and cloud-native applications, which not only meets the needs of enterprise business stability, but also utilizes emerging technologies for innovation.
Gartner believes that in the future, in the process of building digital platforms, most of the time and expenditure will be spent on integration work, and digital transformation requires a hybrid integration platform (Hybrid Integration Platform). The fusion integration platform is the digital service center of an organization that integrates technology, data, and empowers applications. It can well solve the demands of digital transformation of enterprises and is the basis for reconstructing the digital world.
Huawei Cloud Application and Data Integration Platform ROMAConnect
Enterprises will face many difficulties in the process of digital transformation: lack of a unified way to integrate device information; diverse data formats, difficult to transfer and integrate; lack of convenient ways to share data and back-end services with partners; Secure information channel across networks. ROMA Connect is a full-stack application and data integration platform, derived from Huawei's digital transformation integration practice, focusing on application and data connections, and adapting to various common usage scenarios of enterprises. ROMA Connect provides integration capabilities for lightweight messages, data, APIs, and devices, simplifies the process of enterprises migrating to the cloud, supports on-cloud, off-cloud, and cross-regional integration, and helps enterprises realize digital transformation.
ROMA Connect can unify, integrate, adapt and arrange services, messages, and data of basic platforms such as the Internet of Things, big data, video, unified communications, and GIS, and each application, shielding the differences in the interfaces of each platform to the upper-layer business, and providing services to the upper layer , message, and data integration enable services to support the rapid development and deployment of new services and improve application development efficiency.
"ABCDE" 5 connection capabilities
ROMA Connect provides connection capabilities in five aspects of "ABCDE" :
• Application, application integration technology, helps enterprises connect various applications.
• Business, cross-commercial integration capabilities, helping enterprises and upstream and downstream partners to connect business.
• Cloud, providing multi-cloud service capabilities to help enterprises and organizations link business between different cloud services.
• Device, integrating the physical world and the IT world, helps enterprises truly integrate digital transformation capabilities into enterprise operations.
• Ecosystem, a platform pre-installed partner, helps enterprises quickly integrate into the process of digital transformation.
In addition to the five connection capabilities, ROMA Connect also provides four integration capabilities from data to devices, helping enterprises break down data silos, efficiently integrate applications and systems, quickly innovate new services, and ultimately increase the effective value of assets.
Integration Capability 1: Data Integration Capability (FDI)
Fast Data Integration (FDI) is the data integration component of ROMA Connect. FDI supports flexible, fast, and non-intrusive data integration between multiple data sources (text, message, API, relational data, and non-relational data, etc.), and can realize cross-computer room, cross-data center, and cross-cloud data Integrated solutions, and self-service implementation, operation and maintenance, and monitoring of integrated data.
For example, in a group enterprise scenario, the data sources used by the enterprise and its partners are different, making it difficult to form effective information transmission between enterprises. FDI provides a variety of conversion methods between data sources, and supports conversion between mainstream formats such as MySQL, Kafka, and API.
Service integration APIC (API Connect, APIC for short) is the API integration component of ROMA Connect. APIC opens data and back-end services in the form of API, simplifies the process of sharing data or providing services, and reduces the cost of docking between enterprises. APIC provides SDKs and sample codes in different languages to simplify the process of enterprises opening up back-end services in the form of APIs.
For example, the integration of IT systems between the Group and subsidiaries in various regions directly accessing each other’s various databases is too complicated and prone to the risk of information leakage. If the API method is used to open access to each other and at the same time strengthen the security protection of API calls, cross-network cross-connection can be achieved. Regional collaboration.
Integration capability three: message integration (MQS)
Message Queue Service (MQS for short) is a message integration component of ROMA Connect. MQS supports the Kafka protocol and uses a unified message access mechanism to provide enterprises with secure and standardized message channels for cross-network access.
For example, the messaging systems used by enterprises and partners are different, the cost of messaging system docking is high, and it is difficult to guarantee the reliability and security of message transmission after docking. Enterprises can agree to use the Kafka communication protocol, then MQS can be used as a message transfer station to provide a safe and reliable message transmission channel. The enterprise creates multiple topics, sets the permission of each partner to subscribe to the topic, and then publishes the message to multiple topics. Partners obtain news in the topic by subscribing to the topic.
Integration Capability Four: Equipment Integration (LINK)
Device Integration (LINK) is the device integration component of ROMA Connect. Device integration uses the MQTT standard protocol to connect devices, helping enterprises quickly and easily realize device cloud management.
For example, in industrial scenarios, equipment information and parameters in the production process are scattered. When the production line breaks down, if the information and parameters of each device are manually collected, the process of locating the problem is slow. Equipment integration can connect equipment with IT systems and big data platforms, and upload information such as the operating status of equipment to IT systems or big data platforms to realize information visualization of all equipment. Once the production line fails, enterprises can quickly locate the problem. By configuring the rule engine of LINK, the limit value of the device parameters is input into the device engine. If the real-time parameters of the device are always approaching the limit value, an alarm message will be sent to remind the user to stop the device and perform maintenance on the device.
Visualized business flow orchestration capability, lowering the integration threshold
ROMA business flow is a low-code integration flow service provided by ROMA Connect. It provides a visual UI interface to create integration tasks, supports agile self-service, supports visual Low Code design and arrangement, and supports cross-region, cross-instance, and cross-application data integration and service integration , lowering the threshold of integrated development for users with different skills. Using ROMA Connect to create business flow tasks has the following advantages:
• Support visual UI interface to create tasks
Supports creating tasks through a visual UI interface to lower the development threshold for users with different experience backgrounds.
• Support data integration conversion between various types of data sources
It supports cross-region, cross-instance, and cross-application data integration conversion, supports timing and real-time integration modes, and supports custom data mapping rules.
• Support opening and calling API services
It supports the packaging of existing services and data sources into standard RESTful APIs, which are open to the outside world and support multiple authentication methods.
ROMA Connect Accelerates Enterprise Transformation
Through the fusion integration technology of ROMA Connect, the integration and coordination of old and new applications, and the smooth evolution of IT architecture into an architecture of edge-cloud integration can be realized, and the enterprise's own business capabilities can be capitalized, and an enterprise asset center can be built for reuse by other business departments to help enterprises Respond to the rapid development of application modernization and facilitate digital transformation.
At present, ROMAConnect has been widely used in industries such as smart parks, smart cities, smart transportation, electric power and education. In terms of smart cities, Zhangjiagang City built a collaborative and shared urban digital platform based on ROMAConnect, built a city smart government information system, and realized the management and service experience of "one-networking, one-network unified management, and one-screen overview".
To sum up, it can be seen that in the context of digital transformation, through the construction of digital platforms, enterprises can benefit from data aggregation, data intelligence, and digital operations. ROMA Connect is reshaping the path of traditional enterprises to the cloud in the way of "connection and integration" - "all roads" lead to the cloud.